Taliban
Photographs by Thomas Dworzak
Essays by Dworzak, John Lee
Anderson, Thomas Rees
Trolley Books (UK)
128 pages (illustrations), $24.95
Arriving in Kandahar in July 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak intended to ask Afghans to sift through hidden collections of photographs from schools, studies, and families. The Taliban, who had banned photography since taking over in 1996, refused to grant Dworzak a visa, certain he would be “proselytizing.” In December 2001, during the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, he returned to Kandahar. The photographs he collected were commissioned by Taliban warriors wishing to commemorate their heroism, bravery, and (perhaps less consciously) youthful beauty during the American invasion in the fall of 2001. The soldiers, on the brink of defeat, wanted a record of who they were. Dworzak arrived to sort through the abandoned photos whose subjects, one of the photographers reminded him, were mostly now dead.
Since the mullahs had allowed no photography or depiction of mammals, simple signage and advertising flirted with the absurd: signs with graphic stick figures had no heads, a health club’s portrait of a comically Y-shaped body builder put a map of Afghanistan where the face should be. Even bottles of makeup had their smiling models (or at least their eyes) crossed out. In the case of the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban earlier in 2001, destruction was thorough and often irreversible. For these more demotic remains, scavengers such as Dworzak could at least sift through the rubble. Kandahar was always a rather incongruous center for the Taliban’s moral rectitude, having a long tradition of music and play where, in Dworzak’s words, “the men display an almost feminine pleasure in the ‘sweet oriental life.’” The young Taliban soldiers, many of them orphans, had been trained in all-male madrasas and not allowed contact with the sequestered women. But where beauty is regulated by the state and gender roles are subject to strict dress codes, the body glimmers through the cracks, in this case the lens of a camera. For example, young men in Kandahar wore colored sandals two sizes too small because bulging flesh was considered sexy; they painted their eyes with kohl and placed flowers in their guns. And many made sure that someone took a picture of it. In Taliban, we are shown poignant acts of self-assertion. The cover of this beautiful and disturbing book shows a young man wearing an impossibly white turban, allowing one lock of hair to fall onto a smooth forehead. His kohl-lined eyes play harmonically with his black moustache and beard. In an iconic gesture replicated by many of the soldiers, his left hand is placed over his heart. A gold watchband catches the light. His look challenges us, its aggression softened by beauty, youth, and the hand-painted blue background. In one duo shot, posed before a backdrop of camping tents and a city park, one of the men holds flowers, his skull cap askew, while his turbaned friend clutches beads in a hand stenciled with decorative markings. They look like a wedding couple. What relationship does this memorialize? What importance did these decorations have to the subjects? We have no way of knowing. A tone of serious play, like that of gangsta rap, resonates. The only flesh revealed in these photos is the face and neck, while the props include a gun, flowers, beads, a cigarette, and a satellite phone. A young man cradles a vase of flowers in one hand, a pistol in the other, while the backdrop of an alpine chalet provides a bizarrely dislocated domestic setting. Interspersed among these rescued photographs are short essays by Dworzak, John Lee Anderson, and Thomas Rees, elegantly describing the contradictory cultural context of these oddly beautiful photographs. In Kandahar, Dworzak tells us, his balls were frequently grabbed, and he would often be caressed anonymously in a crowd. Yet pederasty, once considered a specialty of this region, was punished by bulldozer by the Taliban, and Mullah Omar had ruled that troops could not have beardless boys. Taliban, like David Deitcher’s Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918 (2001), reveals an intimacy we have trouble interpreting; we know the frame but don’t recognize these pictures. These are men who are comrades, and perhaps more. They are also soldiers of a horrifically repressive and puritanical regime. How can one pose with flowers, arm around your buddy, kohl highlighting beautiful young eyes, and yet be a foot soldier for those who would punish you severely for such an abomination? It is startling to realize the risk layered into these shots and the triumph they contain. Selected by a professional photographer who understood their context, these pictures reveal layers of narcissism, self-protection, and poignancy. They push irony into the background, where it lurks but does not overwhelm. The fake flowers, idyllic garden backdrops, and beatific youths may remind us of Pierre et Gilles (with some of Jack Smith’s “flaming creatures’” thrown in), but the idealization of that more garishly “gay” work is mitigated here by a kind of cargo-cult sincerity; even heavily retouched, the photos remain piercingly pure. Taliban distills volumes of gender, identity, and postmodern image theory with its sparse text and lush pictures. There are flaws: several of the duo shots are spread across two pages, in some cases resulting in a deeply compromised picture, with figures bisected by the gutter and the unity spoiled. Yet while the book’s small size obstructs some of the photographs, this makes it affordable and portable, its images accessible to a wide audience. A regime devoted to obliterating the human image suffers a final defeat, as Taliban remains one of the few things of beauty pulled from the wreckage of its rule in Afghanistan. Jeff McMahon is a performer and writer living in New York and Phoenix and currently teaching at Arizona State University.
The portraits have several formal compositional styles. The solo shots are composed medium close, filling the frame and grazing the top. Hand colored, these shots resemble Warhol portraits, their deep background colors calling attention to their artifice, while modeling the face to gaze directly at the camera, producing an effect that’s both seductive and challenging. These shots, taken in large-format black and white, then developed and hand-colored by the studio, were more expensive for the sitter. Other singles were shot quickly and cheaply in color, developed at one-hour photo stores in Pakistan, and retouched in Kandahar. On these, the (often multiple) backdrops are visible, and bear no relation to the subject. We gaze at a man standing in front of several large posters intended for closer shots, a cruising riverboat placed incongruously above a Swiss chalet. Many of these shots contain a foreground as well; a bench, a bureau table, fake flowers sprouting from a vase.
